Ralph CarothersCasual Raiding in WoW? Part 1
May 6th 2008 18:14
I have played Massively Multi-player Online games, or MMOs, for a very long time. My MMO habit has been around longer than my wife and more than doubles the age of my daughter, who is currently six years old. I've put in many long nights playing various fighters or magic users and, before that, it was paper RPGs. While I loved the characters I’ve played in the games, I’ve never gotten into reaching the final battle. Generally, I would have one high-level character and a bunch of low “alts” [alternate characters] before my interest fizzled out. I had always avoided actual "raiding."
Let me explain what I mean by the term “raid.” It gets thrown around in various instances in World of Warcraft [WoW]. In WoW, and many other games, when you hit, or get very close to, the level cap, you can join with numerous other players to form a group that is much larger than average. For example, in Warcraft, the normal size for a group is five players. In a raid environment, you can go as high as a total of forty players. (That would be thirty-nine other players plus yourself.) There are other games that have had similar systems, but they were usually more difficult to organize.
When I played Everquest [EQ], there was an inefficient party system that made large groups troublesome. WoW, on the other hand, has a variety of raid sizes. Currently, there are ten man, twenty man, and twenty-five man raids. The older dungeons can accommodate up to forty man groups. In previous games, such as EQ, Dark Age of Camelot [DAoC], and Star Wars Galaxies [SWG], I never had the urge to try the top end raiding. The interfaces were not fun to play with and/or there weren't a lot of incentive for me to get to the high end to try them. In DAoC, the only raids I tried were on the dragons, which were added later in the game’s life, and player vs. player, or PvP. In my opinion, PvP was a lot more fun than anything else in DAOC. However, the groups were still very chaotic and something of a hassle.
Thanks to WoW, the very idea of raiding and large numbers of people in one group has changed. Blizzard, the company that runs WoW, tends to encourage raiding at most levels of play. Many people consider "casual" gaming to be someone who can only dedicate small amounts of time to playing the game, anywhere from few hours a week to 1-2 hours most nights. Hardcore players would be the guys who treat the game like a second job or, in extreme cases, their only job.
(continued shortly...)
Let me explain what I mean by the term “raid.” It gets thrown around in various instances in World of Warcraft [WoW]. In WoW, and many other games, when you hit, or get very close to, the level cap, you can join with numerous other players to form a group that is much larger than average. For example, in Warcraft, the normal size for a group is five players. In a raid environment, you can go as high as a total of forty players. (That would be thirty-nine other players plus yourself.) There are other games that have had similar systems, but they were usually more difficult to organize.
When I played Everquest [EQ], there was an inefficient party system that made large groups troublesome. WoW, on the other hand, has a variety of raid sizes. Currently, there are ten man, twenty man, and twenty-five man raids. The older dungeons can accommodate up to forty man groups. In previous games, such as EQ, Dark Age of Camelot [DAoC], and Star Wars Galaxies [SWG], I never had the urge to try the top end raiding. The interfaces were not fun to play with and/or there weren't a lot of incentive for me to get to the high end to try them. In DAoC, the only raids I tried were on the dragons, which were added later in the game’s life, and player vs. player, or PvP. In my opinion, PvP was a lot more fun than anything else in DAOC. However, the groups were still very chaotic and something of a hassle.
Thanks to WoW, the very idea of raiding and large numbers of people in one group has changed. Blizzard, the company that runs WoW, tends to encourage raiding at most levels of play. Many people consider "casual" gaming to be someone who can only dedicate small amounts of time to playing the game, anywhere from few hours a week to 1-2 hours most nights. Hardcore players would be the guys who treat the game like a second job or, in extreme cases, their only job.
(continued shortly...)
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